The Indolence of the Filipino
silk shawls, fantastically but coarsely embroidered, which no one has
thought of imitating in Manila, since they are so easily made; but the
government has other cares, and the Filipinos do not know that such
objects are more highly esteemed in the Peninsula than their delicate
piña, embroideries and their very fine jusi fabrics. Thus disappeared
our trade in indigo, thanks to the trickery of the Chinese, which
the government could not guard against, occupied as it was with other
thoughts; thus die now the other industries; the fine manufactures of
the Visayas are gradually disappearing from trade and even from use;
the people, continually getting poorer, cannot afford the costly cloths
and have to be content with calico or the imitations of the Germans,
who produce imitations even of the work of our silversmiths.
The fact that the best plantations, the best tracts of land in some
provinces, those that from their easy access are more profitable
than others, are in the hands of the religious corporations, whose
desideratum is ignorance and a condition of semi-starvation for the
native, so that they may continue to govern him and make themselves
necessary to his wretched existence, is one of the reasons why many
towns do not progress in spite of the efforts of their inhabitants. We
will be met with the objections, as an argument on the other side,
that the towns which belong to the friars are comparatively richer
than those which do not belong to them. They surely are! Just as their
brethren in Europe, in founding their convents, knew how to select
the best valleys, the best uplands for the cultivation of the vine or
the production of beer, so also the Philippine monks (25) have known
how to select the best towns, the beautiful plains, the well-watered
fields, to make of them rich plantations. For some time the friars
have deceived many by making them believe that if these plantations
were prospering, it was because they were under their care, and the
indolence of the native was thus emphasized; but they forget that in
same provinces where they have not been able for some reason to get
possession of the best tracts of land, their plantations, like Baurand
and Liang, are inferior to Taal, Balayan and Lipa, regions cultivated
entirely by the natives without any monkish interference whatsoever.
Add to this lack of material inducement the absentee of moral stimulus,
and you will see how he who is not indolent in that country must
needs be a madman or at least a fool. What future awaits him who
distinguishes himself, him who studies, who rises above the crowd? At
the cost of study and sacrifice a young man becomes a great chemist,
and after a long course of training, wherein neither the government
nor anybody has given him the least help, he concludes his long
stay in the University. A competitive examination is held to fill
a certain position. The young man wins this through knowledge and
perseverance, and after he has won it, it is abolished, because
......... we do not care to give the reason, but when a municipal
laboratory is closed in order to abolish the position of director,
who got his place by competitive examination, while other officers,
such as the press censor, are preserved, it is because the belief
exists that the light of progress may injure the people more than all
the adulterated foods (26). In the same way, another young man won a
prize in a literary competition, and as long as his origin was unknown
his work was discussed, the newspapers praised it and it was regarded
as a masterpiece, but the sealed envelopes were opened, the winner
proved to be a native, while among the losers there were Peninsulars;
then all the newspapers hastened to extol the losers! Not one word
from the government, nor from anybody, to encourage the native who
with so much affection was cultivating the language and letters of
the mother country! (27)
Finally, passing over many other more or less insignificant reasons,
the enumeration of which would be interminable, let us close this
dreary list with the principal and most terrible of all: the education
of the native.
From his birth until he sinks into his grave, the training of the
native is brutalizing, depressive and antihuman (the word 'inhuman'
is not sufficiently explanatory: whether or not the Academy admit it,
let it go). There is no doubt that the government, some priests like
the Jesuits and some Dominicans like Padre Benavides, have done a
great deal by founding colleges, schools of primary instruction, and
the like. But this is not enough; their effect is neutralized. They
amount to five or ten years (years of a hundred and fifty days at most)
during which the youth comes in contact with books selected by those
very priests who boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives
to know Castilian, that the native should not be separated from his
carabao, that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on;
five to ten years during which the majority of the students have
grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books
say, not even the professors themselves perhaps; and these five to
ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life,
that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees
brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal,
stubborn, constant labor to bow the native's neck, to make him accept
the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast--a labor aided by
some persons, with or without the ability to write, which if it does
not produce in some individuals the desired effect, in others it has
the opposite effect, like the breaking of a cord that is stretched
too tightly. Thus, while they attempt to make of the native a kind of
animal, vet in exchange they demand of him divine actions. And we say
divine actions, because he must be a god who does not become indolent
in that climate, surrounded by the circumstances mentioned. Deprive a
man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral
strength but you also make him useless even for those who wish to
make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its mainspring:
man's is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse,
and he who seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms.
Thus is explained how the natives of the present time are no longer
the same as those of the time of the discovery, neither morally
nor physically.
The ancient writers, like Chirino, Morga and Colin, take pleasure
in describing them as well-featured, with good aptitudes for any
thing they take up, keen and susceptible and of resolute will,
very clean and neat in their persons and clothing, and of good
mien and bearing. (Morga). Others delight in minute accounts of
their intelligence and pleasant manners, of their aptitude for
music, the drama, dancing and singing; of the facility with which
they learned, not only Spanish but also Latin, which they acquired
almost by themselves (Colin); others, of their exquisite politeness
in their dealings and in their social life; others, like the first
Augustinians, whose accounts Gaspar de San Augustin copies, found
them more gallant and better mannered than the inhabitants of the
Moluccas. "All live off their husbandry," adds Morga, "their farms,
fisheries and enterprises, for they travel from island to island by
sea and from province to province by land."
In exchange, the writers of the present time, without being better than
those of former times, neither as men nor as historians, without being
more gallant than Hernan Cortez and Salcedo, nor more prudent than
Legazpi, nor more manly than Morga, nor more studious than Colin and
Gaspar de San Agustin, our contemporary writers, we say, find that the
native is a creature something more than a monkey but much less than
a man, an anthropoid, dull-witted, stupid, timid, dirty, cringing,
grinning, ill-clothed, indolent, lazy, brainless, immoral, etc., etc.
To what is this retrogression due? Is it the delectable civilization,
the religion of salvation of the friars, called of Jesus Christ by
a euphemism, that has produced this miracle, that has atrophied his
brain, paralyzed his heart and made of the man this sort of vicious
animal that the writers depict?
Alas! The whole misfortune of the present Filipinos consists in that
they have become only half-way brutes. The Filipino is convinced that
to get happiness it is necessary for him to lay aside his dignity
as a rational creature, to attend mass, to believe what is told him,
to pay what is demanded of him, to pay and forever to pay; to work,
suffer and be silent, without aspiring to anything, without aspiring to
know or even to understand Spanish, without separating himself from his
carabao, as the priests shamelessly say, without protesting against
any injustice, against any arbitrary action, against an assault,
against an insult; that is, not to have heart, brain or spirit:
a creature with arms and a purse full of gold ............ there's
the ideal native! Unfortunately, or because the brutalization is not
yet complete and because the nature of man is inherent in his being in
spite of his condition, the native protests; he still has aspirations,
he thinks and strives to rise, and there's the trouble!
V
In the preceding chapter we set forth the causes that proceed
from the government in fostering and maintaining the evil we are
discussing. Now it falls to us to analyze those that emanate from
the people. Peoples and governments are correlated and complementary:
a fatuous government would be an anomaly among righteous people, just
as a corrupt people cannot exist under just rulers and wise laws. Like
people, like government, we will say in paraphrase of a popular adage.
We can reduce all these causes to two classes: to defects of training
and lack of national sentiment.
Of the influence of climate we spoke at the beginning, so we will
not treat of the effects arising from it.
The very limited training in the home, the tyrannical and sterile
education of the rare centers of learning, that blind subordination of
the youth to one of greater age, influence the mind so that a man may
not aspire to excel those who preceded him but must merely be content
to go along with or march behind them. Stagnation forcibly results
from this, and as he who devotes himself merely to copying divests
himself of other qualities suited to his own nature, he naturally
becomes sterile; hence decadence. Indolence is a corollary derived
from the lack of stimulus and of vitality.
That modesty infused into the convictions of every one, or, to
speak more clearly, that insinuated inferiority, a sort of daily and
constant depreciation of the mind so that, it may not be raised to
the regions of light, deadens the energies, paralyzes all tendency
toward advancement, and at the least struggle a man gives up without
fighting. If by one of those rare accidents, some wild spirit, that
is, some active one, excels, instead of his example stimulating, it
only causes others to persist in their inaction. 'There's one who will
work for us: let's sleep on!' say his relatives and friends. True it
is that the spirit of rivalry is sometimes awakened, only that then
it awakens with bad humor in the guise of envy, and instead of being
a lever for helping, it is an obstacle that produces discouragement.
Nurtured by the example of anchorites of a contemplative and lazy
life, the natives spend theirs in giving their gold to the Church
in the hope of miracles and other wonderful things. Their will is
hypnotized: from childhood they learn to act mechanically, without
knowledge of the object, thanks to the exercises imposed upon them
from the tenderest years of praying for whole hours in an unknown